Out of Power

it's a tradition that you gain weight through the holidays, what with thanksgiving dinners followed by christmas parties culminating in new years drinking, all occurring during a cold and wet season that makes it harder to get outdoors and exercise ..... but i'm way down on my weight right now ..... would you like to know why? .... it's because of our bleak political landscape, which has taken away my appetite, while all the cock-asses and primary posturing has me vomiting intestinal blood into the diaper pail which, i dare say, will soon go the way of our bill of rights, what with the boys becoming potty animals ..... the dialogues i have with my three-year-olds, exhorting them in the mastery of sphincter control and the processes of elimination, couched in the rather simplistic phrases that are cognitively appropriate, are infinitely more complex than the campaign speeches one hears falling from the mouths of the republican wannabes, summarizing complex and pressing issues like why spending money on social programs is .... well ..... spending money and therefore is fiscally irresponsible, while just forking over shitloads of money to kbr and halliburton and lockheed and martin marietta et al isn't spending money .....

it's a gift, from you to them, and every day is christmas if you're a corporation and it's the morning of terror in america .....

speaking of terror, we made it through the recent storms unscathed, although we did have fifteen hours without electricity .... mill valley is notorious for power outages; decades ago the citizens were given the choice as to whether or not power and telephone lines would be run underground, but they balked at the heady cost of five cents a household and voted no, resulting in no view of mount tamalpais unbarred by poles and wires, and regular power outages from trees crashing through power lines .....

okay, so it might have been a little more than a nickel a pop, but you get the idea ....

i'm always storm ready; i have candles and coleman lanterns and camping stoves, so i could make espresso, and you know -- this fifteen hour span was pretty nice .... i could make and receive telephone calls on my rotary dial telephone, and god, it was great, not having a computer .... there was no way i was going to sally forth in eighty mile an hour winds to take the boys to school, so we all stayed toasty warm at home, and they helped me work on guitars ....

i'd like them to master these fundamental skills reallly quickly; i hate stringing guitars, but acoustic guitars work whether you have power or not .....

still, this was a meditational period and, as i turned pegs and snipped strings in candlelight, i thought, jeez, mill valley in a big storm is like the american sheeple: totally fucking powerless, if you know what i mean, and i think you do .... i can't listen to much radio now; it's too shrill and oppressive, but when i do check into n[o] p[rick] r[adio], all the pundits make me think of pigeons, strutting back and forth with their little pigeon breasts puffed up, their irridescent little neck feathers refracting light like an oil slick on a cesspool, their little heads jerking back and forth, back and forth, their little beaks making incessant sounds, without substance ....

but they don't have pigeon eyes; pigeon eyes are wide and innocuous, while in my mind's eye these assholes have the eyes of a doberman pinscher that's having his hemmorrhoids trimmed with a blunt corkscrew .....

timing is everything, isn't it? funny how, just as we go into primaries, where voters need to be motivated to vote because otherwise they'd stay home and gorge on deep fried foods while guzzling down gallons of extreme lo-carb new and improved fuckass beer, and when republicans have always counted on and used fear as a prime motivator, whether it's fear of women or fear of dark-complected people or fear of well let's just say interspecies love and fear of fear itself and all of a sudden we're told that some iranian motorboats made "threatening gestures" at american warships that were camped out in the straits of hormuz which is kind of like what is an iranian motorboat were they out there waterskiing and having a party drinking lots of arak and dropping trou' and showing some browneye to the boys on board and browneye is always a threat make no mistake and i can see them in their little twelve foot fiberglass dinghies with a nice yamaha 25 horsepower motor zooming around one of our nuclear frigates and i just said, frig it, you fuckers ....

doesn't anyone remember the gulf of tonkin?

and then i realized, yet again, that .....

we don't do history ....

we just do hysteria .....

next: dr. pete recharges his batteries